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TANKER BALLAST WATER TREATING PLANT MEETS TOUGH SPECS

The Sumed organization, a joint company of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, and Kuwait, has built twin 42-in. lines to transport crude from Ain Sukhna on the Red Sea to Sidi Kerir on the Egyptian Mediterranean, 320 km away. Tankers load from five single-buoy moorings (SBM) 5 km offshore, which are supplied from twelve 100,000-cu-m tanks, suitably manifolded to provide different crudes as required. A key challenge of the project was to design a system to adequately purify tanker ballast water, polluted with oil, that must be discharged. This article describes the tanker ballast water treating plant at Sidi Kerir, which purifies ballast water to a level not more than 6 ppm oil content. The facility handles ballast waters up to 2,000 ppm oil. A battery of separators is an integral part of the separation scheme.